Wind, Hills And Four Extra Seconds

The best way to train for a marathon is to run in all kinds of conditions: rain, heat, humidity, cold.  The obvious reason is that you never know what you’re going to get on race day, so by training in everything you’re more likely to be prepared.  And since training for a marathon takes about 5 months, odds are that you’ll find Mother Nature in every one of her moods.  So, for five months I trained in everything: ridiculous heat, 90% humidity, sunny days, cold days.  Yup, I trained for every kind of condition – except for gale force winds.

The 2014 NYC Marathon was last Sunday, and as you may have heard, it was windy.  I mean, really, really windy.  Weather stations reported constant wind of about 10 – 15 miles per hour, with gusts up to 40 miles per hour.  And the big problem is that those 40 mile per hour wind gusts were happening about every other minute.  Now, if you’re watching the marathon on TV, those winds aren’t much of a problem.  If you happen to be standing at the base of the on-ramp of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, it’s a different story. 

My running partner Rita and I were corralled together with several thousand other folks waiting for the fourth and final wave of the NYC Marathon to start. We were shivering, even though each of us was wearing an extra layer that we’d normally toss just before the race got started.  This year, though, we weren’t tossing anything.  In fact, I had lost one of my gloves and was so cold that I did the runner equivalent of dumpster diving by picking up a discarded wrong handed glove off the ground and putting it on backwards after giving the briefest of thoughts  of transmittable diseases.  At one point I turned to Rita and said, “we should do a big group hug just to stay warm,” and then next thing I knew two women standing behind us grabbed us and we had a nice big hug with two women I will never see again.  That’s how cold it was.

Finally the cannon fired to start our wave of the race, and off we went into the wind.  The race is so big that it has 4 different starting waves, and three different starting groups for each wave.  Two groups run over the top of the bridge, and one runs on the lower deck.  The other two times I’ve run the marathon I was in the lower deck starting group, so I’d never run on the top.  This was a bad year to get switched.

Not only did we have to start off by dealing with a rather steep on-ramp, be we had to run up it in these brutal winds that seemed to be going in every direction all at once.  Running hats were getting blown off people’s heads, and people who started off wearing ponchos (they’re good to keep you warm, and you don’t care when you toss them) looked like large sails.  A couple of times the wind knocked me sideways.  At one point Rita and I tried to discard one of our extra sweatshirts, and the moment I let go of it a wind gust grabbed it, blew it the width of the bridge and right out over the water.  No joke.

Finally we fought our way over the bridge and spilled out into Brooklyn.  The crowds there were amazing.  People had come out in this typhoon and were jumping, screaming and cheering us on.  It took my mind off of the wind for a bit and I tried to get into the moment.  Usually at about mile 2 on any run I start to feel really good and just get into it.  Not this time, though.  I felt awful.

Rita and I had decided to start running together, and agreed that it would be OK to split up if we felt it wasn’t working.  By mile 3 I had to ask Rita to slow down a bit.  She happily complied, but I felt bad.  I was not having a good race, and I didn’t want to take her down with me.  At mile 5 I told her that I thought we had to split up.  She had a great pace, but I just couldn’t keep up with it.  So, we did the rest of the race on our own.

At about mile 8 I realized that Brooklyn was one gradual but long hill.  I had trained a lot on big hills, but didn’t think to run for about 6 miles on road sloping up, and my hamstrings and butt were telling me how ill prepared I was for this.  Add the wind on, and I just didn’t think I’d be able to continue.  Honestly.  I’m not writing this so that this story looks like a big triumph at the end.  Before I hit double digit mileage, all I wanted to do was give up.  But I didn’t, and my reasoning was probably absurd but it worked.  The week before the race I had sent an email and posted on Facebook how people could track me during the marathon.  Several people told me they’d be tracking me including my entire new team I had at work.  So every time I thought about just stepping off the course, I thought about how everyone would see me hit mile 8, and then my progress would just stop.  And I couldn’t face that.  So I kept going.

At mile 11 I perked up a little because I knew my first group of fans was coming up.  My sister, sister-in-law and niece were waiting for me along Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, and I was not going to look defeated when I got to them.  They saw me from a block away (I have no idea how they did that), and they were jumping and screaming like all the other spectators, but this time they were screaming for me.  I hugged the three of them, and when I hugged my sister I pulled her in and whispered into her ear: “This is so hard this year.”  My sister is a woman of few words, but when she does use them they are always the right ones.  She held onto me for an extra second and said, “That’s OK.  You can still do this.”  She was right.  This was hard, but it wasn’t impossible.  I finally let go, thanked them for standing in the cold and took off towards bridge #2 and Queens.

The energy pump I got from my family wore off before mile 13.  I was arguing with myself about whether or not I could just run/walk (read: walk a lot and run very little) for the rest of the race, but finally I decided that I wasn’t going to allow myself to walk for at least the first half.  Unfortunately, the halfway point is on the Pulaski Bridge which takes us from Brooklyn to Queens, so I found myself charging up another steep and windy on-ramp.  Ugh, this just sucked.

As we headed into Queens, I started feeling even worse.  I wasn’t having any more problems physically.  The issue was that I knew that the Queensboro Bridge was coming up.  I have two nicknames for that Bridge: “The Evil Queen – sboro” and “The Queensboro [bad word; starts with “B”, rhymes with “itch”].  Simply put, that bridge is my arch nemesis.  She’s a big bully, and every year she beats me up and takes my lunch money. 

This year I spent the two or so miles in Queens thinking about how tough that bridge is on a normal day, and I just didn’t want to do it this year.  Again, I thought about quitting and didn’t even worry about what my friends and new team at work would think of me when they tried to track my progress and saw that there was none.  But then I remembered my own fail-safe that I had built into this marathon: I was running without anything to get me home: no phone, no Metrocard, not one dime.  I’d checked all that stuff with my bag so that the only way I could get to where I was supposed to meet my husband Wil after the finish was by my own feet.  Damn it.

When we got to the bridge, I didn’t even try to fight the bully.  I decided that I was going to walk up the long steep ramp and kill my own time in the process, but at least I’d have enough strength and will to keep going for the rest of the race.  I was handing over the lunch money without having her beat me up first.

I have to admit: it worked.  I was slow going up, but I was able to run on the flat part, even with the wind knocking me sideways again.  But I got to the end and ran down the very steep off ramp, which is usually just as difficult as the on ramp.  I did it. Harrumph.

Running off that [same bad word with the “b” and the “itch”] and onto First Avenue in Manhattan is an experience like no other.  Spectators aren’t allowed on the bridge, and runners all want to die, so it’s very quiet and kind of gets to you.  But First Avenue is like Mardi Gras in New Orleans on steroids.  It is loud, and it is amazing.  It puts any energy back into you that the bully of a bridge took away.

Normally I love when we run up First Avenue.  The crowds are overwhelming and I know I have two sets of family waiting for me.  This year, though, First Avenue was a 3 mile long wind tunnel.  It was almost impossible. At one point the wind knocked me sideways again, and I bumped into a very big guy running next to me.  I said a quick, “Oh, sorry!” and he smiled and replied, “You are at a real disadvantage today.”  Hah, for the first time in my life those 70 pounds I had lost had put me at a disadvantage.  I kind of liked that.

I continued fighting my way through the wind up First Avenue.  At 91^st Street my mom and kids were waiting for me.  I hugged them and my mom said, “This is tough this year!”  Yup.  I continued on, but by 115^th Street I was done yet again.  This was too hard, and I really thought I was going to cry.  But I knew I was going to see my husband soon and I had to get it together before he saw me.  So, I settled back into my run.

I had been taking my gel chews every 5 miles, but each time they gave me a nasty side stitch, so I decided to abandon them.  Then at mile 19 I felt myself hitting The Wall.  Usually I just slow down, but this year I felt like I had suddenly been hit with a bad case of the flu.  Everything hurt and I was exhausted.  Fortunately, this was not my first tea party and I knew my sure fire cure for The Wall: Skittles.  I had stolen a pack of Skittles from my kids’ Halloween candy (trust me; they won’t be missed), and had brought them with me.  As I ate them I thought they were the most delicious things in the world (so if you’ve ever eaten Skittles, you realize how very delusional I was at that point).  But they worked.  I felt better and kept going.

At 125^th Street I saw my husband Wil waiting for me.  He meets me at 125^th and First Avenue, and as I jog into the Bronx and back out, he walks over to 125^th and Fifth Avenue to see me again.  When he saw me he was yelling out some encouraging words, but I wasn’t listening.  For some reason, I suddenly wanted salt, so all I said back was “pretzels!  Bring pretzels to Fifth Ave”.  He vowed to find some, told me how great I was doing (liar), and gently shoved me north towards the Bronx.

I walked up the ramp of the Willis Avenue Bridge (lesson learned), and then across and down the other side.  The Skittles had kicked in and I felt like I was flying.  Right at the off-ramp, the song “Timber” by Pitbull and Ke$ha was playing on a loudspeaker, and I almost started to laugh.  I heard the line “It’s going down.  I’m yelling ‘Timber’!” and finally I felt that good running feeling that I had been looking for back at mile 2 when it would have been a lot more beneficial.  All I can say is may God bless and protect the inventor of Skittles.

The bridge back into Manhattan really isn’t too bad, so I ran over it and got to Fifth Avenue.  The wind seemed even worse, but I was more accepting of it.  At 125^th Street I saw Wil standing with an open bag of pretzels.  I stuck my hand (the one that was wearing the unknown owner’s glove whose disease status was unknown) into the bag and grabbed a handful.  As I was grabbing them Wil said, “I have gummy bears, too.”  I met Wil in 1995, and in the 19 years I have known him, that is the most wonderful thing he has ever said to me.  I grabbed a handful of those, too (with the hand that had been wearing my own glove and at least had DNA on it that I was familiar with), gave Wil an extra kiss and ran down Fifth Avenue with my hands full of a runner’s feast.

I woofed down the pretzels and got two cups of water at the next rest stop.  At mile 22 I ate the gummy bears (at that moment not as tasty as the Skittles but equally effective) and was thrilled not to have to eat the gel chews and get the subsequent side stitch that was paired with it.  Then I looked at my watch and realized that my time was pretty good.  I wanted to step it up, but when my brain told my legs to speed up, my legs replied with a whole bunch of bad words that I can’t put down here, so I just kept doing the best I could.

Just after mile 24 we turn into Central Park at 90^th Street.  I run in Central Park about once a week, and this is the exact part of it that I run on.  Feeling like I was on my home turf, I gained a little kick in my step.  I knew that this part of the park was almost all downhill, and silently gave thanks for gravity as I sped up a little and made it through the park.  At last we exited at 59^th Street and turned west onto Central Park South.  This is the point where I usually start having very mixed emotions.  This is where I know what I’m about to accomplish and I feel the amazing weight of that.  I also usually get sad, though, because I don’t want it to end.  Well, not this year.  All I wanted was to be done.  Columbus Circle felt like a million miles away, but finally we got there and turned back into the park.

Soon after we re-entered the park we hit mile 26.   At last.  I fought the urge to break into a sprint and tried to keep my pace for a minute or two.  In years’ past they’ve had signs up every 100 meters for the last half mile that say, “800 meters to go, 700 meters to go”, etc.  This year, though, most mile markers had to be removed because of the wind (or had been removed by the wind), so they weren’t there.  The GPS on my watch stopped working at mile 22.36, so I had no idea how close I was to the finish line (and my birthday is February 28^th if you’re thinking of getting me a new watch for my since mine totally sucks).  Once I could see it, though, I took off into a sprint, or as well as one can sprint after running about 26.1 miles.

Finally, I crossed the finish line.  I tossed my hands up in the air, and this time I did start to cry.  Just a little and they were happy tears.  I did it.  That was the hardest marathon I ever hope to have to do, but I did it.  

After I got my medal, I remembered that my time near the end had been better than I expected (the GPS on my watch gave out, but the stopwatch was running fine).  I had stopped my watch when I crossed the finish line, but hadn’t looked down to see how I had done.

Last year I had my best marathon time ever, at 5:22:37.  This time I looked down and was happy and sad at the same time.  My time this year was 5:22:41, four seconds slower than my personal best.  I was annoyed I had missed it, but thrilled at how well I had done in a race that was so bad.

The 2014 NYC Marathon is done, and I finished it.  I ran through side stitches, up hills and in wind so strong I kept waiting for Dorothy’s house to land on me.  Like I said, it was horrible.  So, am I running it again next year?  Of course I am.  Just this time I’m going to do some training runs in the wind.